Custom Search Engine

Three birthday candles for Custom Search

2009-10-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

Last Friday was the third anniversary of Custom Search! Here's a photo of our celebratory cake, baked by John Skidgel, our multitalented Senior Interaction Designer. Our cake was baked in between code reviews for our brand new Look and Feel tab. The magnifying glass was a chocolate cake and the handle and cubes are made from marshmallow and rice cereal squares. Luckily, the local cooking store had ready-made fondant in Google colors. :-)

Thanks to you, our users, the Custom Search platform has grown over the last three years: We now have millions of registered Custom Search engines globally, and are serving many tens of millions of search queries per day. Custom Search, now among the top two widgets on the web, powers websites ranging from the New York Times, MacWorld and Orbitz to individual and topical websites. Since the launch of the Blogger gadget a few months back, hundreds of thousands of bloggers use it to help people find information on their sites. Many applications, such as Community Help within Adobe Creative Suite 4 and topical search on About.com, make use of our unique features, such as label refinements, promotions and Linked Custom Search.

In addition to focusing on ranking, on-demand indexing, customizability, ease of use, language support and scalability, we've tried to serve your business needs too — AdSense for Search and Site Search are built on top of the Custom Search platform. These products offer you choice — you can share revenue with Google with topical ads or further control presentation and branding options with the use of XML. We've also developed APIs for our developers and partners.

We wanted to celebrate this week, not just with customized cake, but by treating you to something special. Website owners have always asked about more power and more customization of search results, so we're happy to introduce Custom Search Themes, Structured Custom Search and the Custom Search Wikipedia skin. You can read details about these new features right here on the Custom Search blog. And, starting today, you can follow us at our new Twitter account @googlecse.

Custom Search Themes — Now, with the ultra-configurable Element, you can pick from among a set of convenient layouts and slick styles for your search results. Themes enable well-designed interactive results that you can use instantly on your website and also offer maximum flexibility to further customize every aspect of results presentation. There's also a compact layout for a great mobile experience when using an Android-powered phone, iPhone, iPod Touch or Palm Pre. When you create a Custom Search engine, a mobile home page is automatically created for you.

Structured Custom Search — You know your website and data better than anyone. We already return Rich Snippet metadata attributes in XML results if you provide structured metadata through markup on your pages. Starting today, special attributes, such as Thumbnails and Actions, will be rendered in Custom Search results. More exciting, you can now restrict your search results by specific attributes, based on the metadata that you provide. Custom metadata attributes and custom query restricts will make your searches truly structured.

Wikipedia Custom Search Skin — If you use Wikipedia for research, the Custom Search Wikipedia skin provides highly contextual search results when you search within Wikipedia. You get Google search across all Wikipedia articles as well as topical results based on the links on the Wikipedia article you are currently reading. We think this makes for faster research.

Search is now an expected way to quickly find and navigate information, but there are still many millions of websites out there that don't even have a search box. We hope that these powerful Custom Search tools will help get high-quality search quickly enabled on these websites. After all, you can configure a Custom Search box for your website in minutes!

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer

Plug-n-play with Custom Search Themes

2009-10-26T00:07:00.000-07:00

Besides great results relevance, one of the most popular features of Custom Search is the ability for you to customize the look and feel of the results to match your website. Our users have always requested more control over results presentation. What's Custom Search without customization?

Today, we're launching Custom Search Themes, which make customized presentation a blast!

You can now select from among a set of slick styles that make the search results look awesome. If you love a style, but need to tweak it, you can customize it further by changing fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouseovers. The preview function shows you the effects of your changes instantaneously - WYSIWYG.

You can also select from among a set of convenient layouts for full flexibility on the location of the search box and results - contiguous or in 2 columns - you decide! We've even added a compact layout (with only 4 results) that is useful for websites where space is at a premium and search results will not occupy the whole page. Mobile Custom Search, launched last week, uses the compact layout for rendering results on high-end mobile devices e.g., Android phones, the iPhone, iPod touch and Palm Pre. We automatically create a Google-hosted home page for every Custom Search engine, so you can redirect mobile visitors to this page, since we automatically serve up mobile-optimized results.

There are several results hosting options. The most flexibility is offered by the Element, which renders results inline on a webpage -- your users can quickly review results, narrow results to specific categories with a simple tabbed interface, and dismiss results, all without leaving your webpage. We believe this will make it easier and faster for your website's users to find the information they are looking for. The Element now renders special structured data, e.g., Thumbnails and Actions, that you can provide via structured markup on the page.

With Themes, we're providing great look and feel options for your results out-of-the-box. If you want even more control, you can directly download and manipulate the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files that control results styling. You can also refer to the documentation on the AJAX Search API that the Element is built with. Remember - not all customization is pretty, so choose wisely!

We'd love to hear your feedback about Custom Search Themes. If you build out a great customized theme that you'd like to share with us and other Custom Search users, we'd love to see it.

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer

Structured Custom Search

2009-10-25T23:28:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, we announced support for Rich Snippets in Custom Search results. If you provide in-page metadata markup, via RDFa, Microformats, or PageMaps, the Custom Search platform extracts the metadata attributes and returns these as PageMaps in your XML results, so you can render these structured attributes in your search results.

Now, our metadata support just got a whole lot better!

Thumbnails and Actions

If you use the Custom Search Element, you can now add publisher-provided links to your search results based on specific metadata markup in your web pages. These special structured data objects, such as Thumbnails and Actions, are generated from the PageMaps you provide. For example, Scribd, one of our partners, provides both Thumbnails and Actions in PageMaps on their pages, so we display both of these in our sample Custom Search engine, as shown below. The Actions in this case are "Download" and "Fullscreen View", but each publisher can provide customized actions, which they can also style via CSS.

In the case of the above document, the PageMap markup for the Thumbnails and Actions is as follows:


<PageMap>
 <DataObject type="thumbnail">
    <Attribute name="src" value="http://i5.scribdassets.com/public/images/uploaded/70327880/D9mDLlYzlw_thumbnail.jpeg"/>
    <Attribute name="width" value="100"/>
    <Attribute name="height" value="130"/>
 </DataObject>

 <DataObject type="action">
    <Attribute name="label" value="Download"/>
    <Attribute name="url" value="http://www.scribd.com/document_downloads/20258723?extension=pdf"/>
    <Attribute name="class" value="download"/>
 </DataObject>

 <DataObject type="action">
    <Attribute name="label" value="Fullscreen View"/>
    <Attribute name="url" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=20258723&access_key=key-27lwdyi9z21ithon73g3&version=1&viewMode=fullscreen"/>
    <Attribute name="class" value="fullscreen"/>
 </DataObject>
</PageMap>

If you markup your own pages, as shown above, the Element will render your Thumbnails and Actions in your own Custom Search engine.

Structured Search

The above example shows how easy it is for you to add valuable metadata to your pages for use in display in Custom Search results. So, in the sample engine that we used above, here's what the result looks like when you type the query [halloween]. We see a set of nicely formatted results that match the query.

Wouldn't it be nice to use these metadata attributes in your search? We think so too, so we've enabled a way for you to restrict your search results via use of a special operator. Let's say that we wanted to restrict the results to those results that were authored by a specific author, e.g., "lisamorton" (author of the second result above). We can easily do this by adding the following restriction in our search query: [halloween more:pagemap:document-author:lisamorton]. This gives us exactly what we want - documents authored by "lisamorton":

Let's break down the more:pagemap:document-author:lisamorton restriction. The more: operator is what we use for refinement labels. The pagemap: tells us to refine results by specific attributes in the indexed PageMaps. The document-author: qualifier tells us to look for the specific attribute of interest - the document DataObject in the PageMap with child attribute called author. This is followed by lisamorton, which is just the actual value that we are using for the restriction. You can use this open-ended syntax for querying the appropriate DataObjects in your own documents.

The PageMap that represents the document and author information in the markup of the above pages is as follows:


<PageMap>
 <DataObject type="document">
    <Attribute name="title">The Five Scariest Traditional Halloween Stories</Attribute>
    <Attribute name="author">lisamorton</Attribute>
 </DataObject>
</PageMap>

You can provide hooks in your application to filter results by attributes that are important for your users, so users will not have to type these restriction qualifiers directly.

Rich Snippet Preview Tool

Check out the Rich Snippet preview tool. This tool allows you to view not only the Rich Snippets markup recognized for Google web search, but also the additional customized markup that we support in Custom Search. You can immediately see how your web page will be processed after indexing, and what metadata attributes will be returned in PageMaps in your Custom Search results. If there are any errors in your markup, you can fix them right away! Remember - you need to add the &view=cse parameter to this tool to review the additional metadata extracted by Custom Search.

Here's a screenshot from the tool for one of the above results, showing all the PageMap markup recognized by Custom Search:

Many customers have asked for additional structured capabilities, richer snippet presentation and filtering and drill-down capabilities in Custom Search. We'd love to hear feedback from you on these structured data features that offer you more power and flexibility to help users find what they are looking for on your site.

Posted by: Anthony Francis and David Gibson, Software Engineers

A contextual search experience for Wikipedia

2009-10-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia users can now configure a Custom Search skin to customize their Wikipedia search experience. Once configured, the skin helps you to search Wikipedia, and for contextually relevant articles, from any Wikipedia page. This can make it easier to find relevant information, especially on Wikipedia pages with many links, and where the topics you are researching are ambiguous. You can find instructions to configure the Custom Search skin at Wikipedia. It works with Wikipedia's Monobook and the Beta Vector skins, and should work on Wikipedia domains globally. Remember that you need a user account and must log in to Wikipedia to use it.

With the skin configured, if you are reading the Wikipedia page on NASA, and do a search for the query [mars], you are presented inline results organized into 3 tabbed groups: All Wikipedia pages, Linked Wikipedia pages, and Linked non-Wikipedia pages. The first tab shows all Wikipedia articles that match, including those about the candy (Mars Bars) and the television series (Veronica Mars). The next 2 tabs provide contextually relevant results that are linked from the NASA page, such as information about various Mars rovers, orbiters, and space labs, as shown in the screenshot.

Here's what's going on under the covers:

Linked Custom Search enables the creation of dynamic search experiences, where the content being searched can be defined on the fly, and can change over time as new information becomes relevant. The Custom Search skin creates a Linked Custom Search engine on demand for every Wikipedia page that you navigate to.

The results from the current Wikipedia domain, as well as the results from the per-page dynamic search engine, are presented inline in tabbed categories via the AJAX search API. You can refine results by the category of choice, and quickly review the results without having to open a new browser window or tab. This happens through the Javascript code in the skin. The skin's CSS defines the look and feel of the results.

As for the page-specific Linked Custom Search engine, it computes the contextual results within the Linked Wikipedia pages (on-domain) and Linked non-Wikipedia pages(off-domain) categories. These two tabs are technically very similar, so we'll just describe how one of them works.

Suppose you're visiting the NASA article and search for [mars]. The Linked Wikipedia tab sends the search query to Google Custom Search, along with a parameter that indicates that the search engine specification is at (view source in browser):

http://googlecustomsearch.appspot.com/wikipedia/spec.do?url=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA

Google picks up this Linked CSE request and uses the above specification and the supplied query. You can simulate this process by visiting:

http://www.google.com/cse?cref=http://googlecustomsearch.appspot.com/wikipedia/spec.do?url=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA&q=mars

A different specification is generated for every Wikipedia page (based on url) by a tiny AppEngine application at http://googlecustomsearch.appspot.com. The specification defines a search engine with two facets, labeled "internal" (Linked Wikipedia pages) and "external" (Linked non-Wikipedia pages). The list of "internal" (and "external") webpages to search over is provided by this line in the specification:

This causes Google to visit the webapp at a new URL (annotations.do). Our webapp now collects links from the NASA article, classifies them as "internal" or "external", and returns the annotations in an XML format. You can see the result at (view source in browser)

http://googlecustomsearch.appspot.com/wikipedia/annotations.do?url=en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNASA

Now Google can finish building the Custom Search engine for the NASA article, and compute the results for [mars]. The results are returned to your web browser and displayed in the appropriate tab.

But wait! Our little AppEngine webapp doesn't have the CPU horsepower or bandwidth to scan Wikipedia pages on-demand or in nearly-real-time for thousands of Wikipedia users. Instead, the webapp asks Google to scan the page, via a Custom Search tool called makeannotations. The request looks something like this:

http://google.com/cse/tools/makeannotations?url=en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNASA&label=myLabel

After makeannotations returns the list of links in the NASA article in XML, the webapp simply rewrites the XML according to the domain of each link.

Since we are creating the per-page search engines on demand, there can sometimes be a short delay in the creation of the search engine, e.g., for new or obscure pages. However, for popular Wikipedia pages, these definitions should be cached, and you should see no delays. In fact, we use a ping method to load up the Custom Search engine in advance before you search. Remember that if there are not many links on the Wikipedia page you are searching from, you may sometimes find no matches for linked pages.

We've open sourced the code for this application. Feel free to work with it. Feel free to extend the skin beyond Monobook and Vector. We built this skin with the help of Wikipedia, and hope that you will provide feedback on your experience. You can also provide your feedback directly to Wikipedia.

Posted by: Paul Komarek, Software Engineer and Jeffrey Scudder, Developer Programs Engineer

Google Custom Search for your smartphone

2009-10-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

In our recent Product Ideas survey, one of the most-requested features was about enabling a mobile version of Custom Search. Guess what: It's here! As announced on the Google Mobile blog, Custom Search now enables a rich interactive mobile experience on high-end devices such as Android-powered phones, iPhone, iPod touch, and Palm Pre.

Try it out on your phone right now: search for user-generated content (e.g., search for [maradona]) from sites like Wikipedia, Knol, etc., or learn all about the latest and greatest Custom Search features on our product's mobile search engine (e.g., search for [snippets]).

Custom Search engine results can be embedded in your own site, but website owners can also choose to have Google host the search results page. You can now redirect visitors using these high-end mobile devices to Google-hosted search results, and we will serve up search results optimized for these devices. Better yet, we create a Google-hosted home page for every Custom Search engine that we create (even if you decide to host the results on your own website). Starting today, users who arrive at the home page for your Custom Search engine will be automatically served pocket-sized Custom Search results, along with your search engine customizations, like your labels and promotions.

All you need to do at your own end is redirect users who arrive at your website on one of the supported mobile devices to the hosted Custom Search home page. Another alternative is to provide a button or link on your web site that directs people to your Custom Search home page, whose URL looks like (you will need to replace the ID after "cx=" with your own Custom Search engine ID):

http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=013315504628135767172:d6shbtxu-uo

Of course, if you'd like to serve these mobile results from your own website, you can replicate the functionality of the mobile home page on your own website. This page uses the Custom Search Element. If you do, you will still need to take care of the redirection at your website so that mobile users receive mobile-friendly search results automatically.

If Google web search is the entry point for navigating the web, we hope you'll use this interactive Custom Mobile Search entry point to help people navigate your own web content when they need information on the go!

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer

Google Sites turns Custom Search on

2009-10-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Google Sites offers users a very simple way to create and publish web sites. Multiple users can collaborate to manage website content as well as add various gadgets into their websites. Google Sites now allows the addition of Google Custom Search as a search option.

In the following example, we add a Yoga Search Custom Search experience to the Yoga for Life web site in a few simple steps. (The example assumes that the Yoga for Life website is hosted by Google Sites, and that the Yoga Search has already been created using Google Custom Search.)

Select the "Site Layout" option from the Navigation menu on the left. Click the "Configure Search" button.

Select the Advanced tab in the "Configure site search" dialog. To add a new search provider, click on the "Add provider" button.

Now, we'll need to get information about the Custom Search engine we want to use. Open up another tab or browser window and login to the Custom Search control panel. Find the URL for the search engine you want to use by clicking on it's name in the list called My search engines. Copy this URL; you will use it in the next step. In this example, we'll use the URL for Yoga Search.

Go back to the Google Sites search provider dialog. Select "Google Custom Search" as the provider type. Type in the Name, e.g., "Yoga Search" for the search option you'd like your users see on your site, and paste the Custom Search Engine URL that you obtained in the earlier step. Leave the Show results in site option checked. Click OK.

You can change your default provider by clicking on the "General" tab in the "Configure site search" dialog and selecting "Yoga Search". Make sure to Save your settings. You're done.

Your users will see Yoga Search as the default search option in the search box on the Yoga for Life website. Search, and your results from the Yoga Search Custom Search engine will show up inline, with the look and feel of your site.

Try it out for your site, with your own Custom Search engine! As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on new features in the user group.

Posted by: Scott Johnston, Senior Product Manager, Google Sites and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

Product Ideas for Custom Search

2009-09-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Christine Moschella, Online Operations

Your feedback is one of the most important things we consider when planning updates and improvements to Google Custom Search. In addition to reviewing the feedback and suggestions that you make in our user group, we're opening up a P roduct Ideas page for you to share your opinions about Custom Search. Just like other Product Ideas series, you'll be able to submit your own idea and vote for ideas from other users.

If you've got ideas or suggestions for Custom Search - features you want, things we can do better - tell us! We want to hear from you. We've created a set of categories, so please try to find the most appropriate category for your suggestion or idea. Product Ideas for Custom Search will remain open for you for the next month.

If you have questions, visit the Product Ideas FAQ - but if you want to get started right away, go for it! Vote for a suggestion, or enter your own idea on the Custom Search Product Ideas page.

Custom Search with Style like Peanut Butter with Jelly

2009-08-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Jeff Scudder, Developer Programs Engineer

Creating a custom look and feel for your website can have significant benefits in everything from improving usability to setting a professional or playful tone for your website. In many cases, letting users search the content of your site and related sites gets them the information they need faster. After all, a speedy user experience is a happy user experience. Here are some examples of how Custom Search and custom styles are as easy (and delicious) as peanut butter and jelly.

We start with a Custom Search Element, which uses the CustomSearchControl to add Custom Search to my web page. If you've never used a Custom Search engine before, I think you'll find a lot to love: it uses Google's search technology to include a specific group of websites for indexing, and you can share in ad revenue.

One of the many benefits of using the AJAX Search APIs to dynamically add search capabilities to your web pages is that you can also control the look and feel of the search input and results by using open web standards like cascading style sheets (CSS). When you combine this styling with Custom Search, you can create a seamless search experience for your users.

You can begin by changing the search input box (dynamically added to your page by default) to use an input box that you've placed on the page wherever you like.

// Set drawing options to use my text box
// as input instead of having the library create one.
var drawOptions = new google.search.DrawOptions();
drawOptions.setInput(document.getElementById('query_input'));

// Draw the control in content div
customSearchControl.draw('results', drawOptions);

With the above changes we get a page that looks like this:

Now that we're able to use a Custom Search box (look ma, no button push required!) we can add CSS rules to change fonts, colors, and more in the search results.

For example, see: http://ajax-apis.appspot.com/cse-style which has CSS rules that effect the styling of the search results and compare it to our first step which uses the default styles.

Take a look at the CSS rules to get an idea for how this works, and how you can do custom styling to fit your own website.

We can change the font and add a border around each search result:

#results .gsc-results {
/* Sets font for titles, snippets, and URLs. */
font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}

#results .gsc-result {
position: relative;
border: 1px solid #eee;
border-left: 10px solid #eee;
padding: 8px 8px 8px 20px;
border-radius: 8px;
-webkit-border-radius: 8px;
-moz-border-radius: 8px;
}

We can also change the style of a single result when the user moves the mouse cursor over it:

#results .gsc-result:hover {
border: 1px solid #888;
border-left: 10px solid #888;
}

These are just a couple of examples. Since the CSS styling is handled by the browser, you can use any supported CSS rules to select portions of the search results. For more information on the result HTML structure and the CSS classes you may want to select in your own customizations, see the documentation on styling AJAX Search results.

More transliteration languages for Custom Search

2009-07-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Christine Moschella, Online Operations

A few weeks ago, we announced support for transliteration in Custom Search in a bunch of languages, including Arabic and a set of Indic languages. The auto-transliteration feature allows your users to conveniently type in English, for example, and search in one of these languages.

Now, that list of transliteration languages in Custom Search has grown. We now support a dozen languages, including Urdu and Nepali.

The feature is very simple to use: you can turn transliteration on in the Language settings section of the Basics page on the Custom Search control panel.

Once you've enabled automatic transliteration, a language button next to the search box alerts your users. As a user types, the query is transliterated into the selected language in real-time, allowing the user to search in that language.

For more details, read our original transliteration blog post, or search on the Custom Search website!

Here's the current list of supported transliteration languages:

Arabic
Bengali
Gujarati
Hindi
Kannada
Malayalam
Marathi
Nepali
Punjabi
Tamil
Telugu
Urdu

Feel free to share your feedback on transliteration in our forum.

Better search on more websites

2009-07-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer

Earlier this year, we made it easier to add high quality search to your websites by delivering search functionality right to where many of you manage your sites online: your hoster's console. The Custom Search provisioning API allows partners, such as web hosters, to configure search boxes for your site without requiring you to come to Google. This also enabled Custom Search to be added to Google Services for Websites, an offering of useful website tools and services for partners.

Many hosters have enabled Webmaster Tools and Custom Search in their control panels; Aplus.net is the most recent addition to our list of partners that have integrated Custom Search into their service using Google Services for Websites. Aplus.net provides online business services and tools, such as web hosting, domain name registration, web design, and e-commerce services as well as dedicated servers and managed hosting solutions, to small- to medium-sized businesses.

Here's a screenshot of their integration. Websites can enable search with a couple of clicks!

Working with partners such as web hosting providers has made things a great deal easier for webmasters, making useful tools more accessible. Integrating with the right tools will help you analyze your website traffic and improve user retention; Custom Search is a critical element of this, helping people find the right information, products and services quickly.

We are looking forward to enabling more partners to integrate with these important webmaster services. As always, let us know how we can improve our products and services. If you are a web site hoster interested in incorporating Google webmaster services into your platform, check out Google Services for Websites.

Advanced Custom Search Configuration

2009-06-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Here's the presentation on Advanced Custom Search Configuration from Google I/O. You can navigate it with the help of a convenient timeline at YouTube, or download the presentation in PDF format. The talk features Nick Weininger from the Custom Search team on how to create a contextual search experience in minutes, along with details of the Custom Search APIs, including:

Context and Annotations
Advanced features, e.g., Promotions, Synonyms and XML results
RESTful URLs for managing Custom Search engines
Provisioning API for partners
Linked Custom Search
Rich snippets and metadata - pagemaps, microformats and RDFa
The Blogger search gadget
The Custom Search Web Element

In addition, Mark Nichoson from Adobe talked about Adobe Community Help, a customized search application that's available within apps in Adobe's Creative Suite 4. Joel Brandt from Adobe followed up with a description of Blueprint, an innovative application that integrates Custom Search into the Flex development environment.

For more information, please check out the Custom Search developer guide.

Automatic transliteration for Custom Search

2009-06-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Mohamed Elfeky and Adel Youssef, Software Engineers

Typing is harder in some languages than others! When you're searching for content in a specific language, it is often convenient to think in that language, but type in another, e.g., English.

We've just made this easier to do in Custom Search. We've enabled transliteration in Custom Search for a set of languages, making it easier to find news in Arabic, Indian news in Hindi, your favorite Bollywood song lyrics, or local content in a bunch of other Indic languages - Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. Other languages will be enabled soon.

The Google Arabia blog recently posted information on Google Ta3reeb, enabling Arabic transliteration in various modes, including within Custom Search.

Here's a screenshot from oneindia.in, a website that has enabled transliteration in a set of Indian languages.

Users can type in English; automatic transliteration converts the query to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, or Telugu, and helps find relevant content in that language.

Automatic transliteration can now be easily configured in the Custom Search control panel using the Language settings. It will enable conversion of Roman characters to the above languages, allowing users to search for content in these languages. After you turn transliteration on, you can select the specific transliteration languages your users can use.

After enabling transliteration, you can preview your search experience - a language button will show up before the search box, alerting users to the fact that transliteration is enabled, and that they can issue queries in that language while entering the queries in English. In fact, multiple languages can be selected for transliteration. As a query is entered, it is transliterated into the selected language in real-time.

Hit search, and results in the desired language are presented. Voila!

For more information on transliteration, you can check out our help center. As always, we're looking forward to your feedback on our user forum.

A search box for Blogger

2009-05-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer

Custom Search enables anyone to create a tuned search experience that's contextually relevant. For example:

Individuals can create a personalized search experience around their bookmarks, blogs, and public web sites
Web site owners can provide Site Search
Publishers can provide search across multiple publications
Communities can collaborate to create topical search engines across thousands of web pages

For bloggers, blogging platforms typically provide in-built search tools that allow searching across published blog posts, or across tags and categories. With Custom Search, you can go one step further: you can define a search experience that evolves over time, and includes not just your blog posts, but links extracted from those posts, as well as links from your blog's link lists and blog lists - in short, all items of interest related to your blog.

If you author a blog on Blogger, we've built a search gadget for you that does this - the AJAX Custom Search gadget creates a Linked Custom Search engine that automatically updates to allow your readers to search your blog's entire neighbo(u)rhood. It is a uniquely flavo(u)red search experience that gets richer over time. Search results appear inline, so your users don't have to leave your blog. The results inherit the look and feel of the blog, as shown in the screenshot below.

On Blogger, you can add the gadget with a couple of clicks:

Edit your blog's layout (Page Elements tab)
Click on "Add a Gadget" and configure the new "Search Box" gadget.

You can configure tabs that will allow your blog's readers to restrict their search to specific link lists or blog lists; you decide which ones you want to configure.

If you are using this gadget, we'd love to hear your feedback in our discussion group.

The AJAX Search and the Custom Search APIs have also been combined to create the Custom Search element that we recently announced at Google I/O.

Introducing the Custom Search Web Element

2009-05-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer

Google Web Elements, unveiled today at Google I/O, build on your favorite Google products so you can easily add richness, interactivity and monetization to your website with the simplicity of copy and paste. We've packaged this simplicity into the new Custom Search element, making it even easier for you to add Google-quality search to your website. By helping your users find information faster, you can retain users on your website and monetize search with relevant Google ads. The element will allow you to create an interactive, inline search experience, so users don't need to leave the web page they are on in order to search.

You can create a Custom Search element in two convenient ways: via the Custom Search element wizard, or by selecting the appropriate options within the Custom Search control panel.

When you log on to the control panel, you'll see links to the Custom Search element wizard if you list your search engines (My search engines). If you click through to the wizard from the control panel, the appropriate search engine information is automatically extracted by the wizard -- all you need to do is preview your search results, and copy and paste the generated code into your website.

You can also generate the right code for embedding the Custom Search element into your website by going to the updated Get code tab in the control panel. A new option allows you to generate element code.

The Custom Search element supports Promotions, which let you highlight specific information for specific queries. Refinement Labels automatically appear as separate tabs in the element, so you can navigate quickly to the category of results that you're looking for. The screenshot below shows a preview of the search results in the element wizard.

While the Custom Search element is designed to help you get started quickly without spending time on the deep technical details, it is powered by Google's scalable and flexible developer APIs, including the AJAX Search and Custom Search APIs, offering a world of customization.

Let us know if there are further improvements we can make to this user experience. To learn more about Google Web Elements, check out the AJAX API blog.

Custom Search at Google I/O

2009-05-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Saksiri Tanphaichitr, Software Engineer

If you're attending the upcoming Google I/O Developer Conference (May 27th and 28th), make sure to attend the sessions where we plan to discuss the latest Custom Search developments.

There are 2 sessions that will highlight Custom Search:

These sessions, part of the AJAX + Data APIs track, will discuss ways in which you can easily build, embed, and customize a contextual search experience on your website. You will learn how to develop advanced applications using the AJAX Search and Custom Search APIs, create dynamic experiences with Linked Custom Search, and programmatically provision Custom Search for your users. We'll also talk about interesting developer applications, as well as advanced presentation of search results including features that we recently launched: Rich Snippets and Promotions.

Adobe, one of our partners, will join us in discussing their use of Custom Search, and will also show interesting developer applications built on top of the Custom Search platform at the Developer Sandbox.

Here's a sneak peek:

We look forward to seeing you at Google I/O.

Custom Search promotions made easier

2009-05-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Bartlomiej Niechwiej and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers

Last year, we made it easier to promote relevant information to the top of your search results for specific queries, but there were still a couple of steps you had to take to make this happen. So now, we've made it easier than ever to create promotions in Custom Search. You can quickly configure specific webpages or information to display above your search results for specific queries, allowing you to highlight key events, announcements, services or products.

We've added a new Promotions tab to the Custom Search control panel to help you manage all your promotions.

Creating a promotion is easy - decide on the queries that should trigger a specific promotion, select a title and URL for your promotion, and add optional information, such as description and image thumbnail. The promotion edit pane also shows a preview of your promotion.

When you're done, promotions will display in your search results for the queries that match your trigger list. You can test a promotion by issuing one of the trigger queries in the control panel results preview.

A few pointers:

you can control the look and feel of the promotions to distinguish them from regular search results (through Promotion Design Settings)
you may want to create promotions to highlight information for popular queries on your search engine (use search statistics to identify them)
you should delete promotions when they are no longer relevant
our updated developer documentation includes more information on promotions

We hope to see useful promotions popping up in custom search results all over the web.

Don't miss the promotions when you search on the Custom Search website! We'd love to get your feedback on how we can make this feature even more useful.

Enabling Rich Snippets in Custom Search

2009-05-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer

Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in webpages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help you quickly identify the relevance of your results. Experiments on Google have shown that people find this additional data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from a webpage, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their webpages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.

Since Custom Search sits on top of the Google web search platform, we're enabling Rich Snippets for custom search engines too. In fact, Custom Search provides support for richer snippets; you can define your own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your custom search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called PageMaps. A PageMap identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation.

So, if you're using Custom Search or Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information -- such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings, and prices -- in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages. As in the example shown below, displaying specific attributes can make the snippet more useful for shoppers.

At this time, Rich Snippets attribute information for Custom Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. We're looking to make this easier for you in the future. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and PageMap attributes may not be indexed from all webpages.

As an illustration, the webpage featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.

A sample PageMap for the above example defines custom attributes that are encoded in DataObject tags via the following markup:

<!--
<PageMap>
 <DataObject type="image">
  <Attribute name="image_src" value="http://www.nytimes.com/images/2009/03/14/business/14vend.751.jpg"/>
 </DataObject>
 <DataObject type="publication">
  <Attribute name="author" value="John Tagliabue"/>
  <Attribute name="date" value="March 14, 2009"/>
  <Attribute name="category" value="Business/World Business"/>
 </DataObject>
</PageMap>
-->

If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.


<r n="1">
 <u> http://www.xyz.com/business/vending_machine.html </u>
 ...
 <t> In Italy, a Vending Machine Even Makes the <b>Pizza</b> </t>
 ...
 <s>The European vending machine industry has annual sales of about #33 billion, much of it coming from factories and offices.</s>
 ...
 <PageMap>
  <DataObject type="image">
   <Attribute name="image_src" value="http://www.nytimes.com/images/2009/03/14/business/14vend.751.jpg"/>
  </DataObject>
  <DataObject type="publication">
   <Attribute name="author" value="John Tagliabue"/>
   <Attribute name="date" value="March 14, 2009"/>
   <Attribute name="category" value="Business/World Business"/>
  </DataObject>
 </PageMap>
 ...
</r>

Let us know if you have feedback about custom Rich Snippets. For more information, join us for a discussion on Advanced Custom Search Configuration at Google I/O on May 27.

Web Search APIs: The next generation

2009-04-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

If you are going to the World Wide Web conference in Madrid next week (April 20-24), make sure to attend the panel entitled "Web Search APIs: The Next Generation". Nick Weininger from the Custom Search team will be on the panel. He's going to talk about real-world needs from a Search API, and how the Custom Search API provides various customization options for indexing, ranking, navigation, presentation and monetization.

Don't miss the panel!

Check out details on the WWW 2009 conference program.

Google Services for Websites includes Custom Search

2009-03-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Kevin Godzilla Lim, Technical Writer

As you might have read on the Official Google Blog today, Google is launching Google Services for Websites, a new program that lets partners offer Google services — including Custom Search, Site Search, Webmaster Tools, and AdSense — to their users.

Partners, such as hosting providers and blogging platforms, can integrate these services into their own management consoles, making the services easily accessible to their users. Google Services for Websites allows partners to create Google accounts, submit Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools, configure Custom Search, and provision new AdSense accounts on behalf of customers. Additionally, partners are eligible for referral fees for certain services.

Once Google Services for Websites has been integrated into the control panel, users can configure their Google services in minutes. These services can help increase website traffic, provide site search, and monetize website content. In fact, a number of web hosting providers have already integrated these services into their offerings.

Furthermore, all of these services are designed to complement and enhance one another. For example, Sitemaps submitted to Webmaster Tools not only improve the discoverability of websites on Google search, but also improve coverage and freshness in the Custom Search index. AdSense accounts can also be associated with search, which lets website owners earn revenues from relevant ads displayed alongside search results.

To learn more about integrating Google Services for Websites with your services, read the Google Services for Websites program overview.

Integrating Custom Search with your service

2009-02-03T10:47:00.000-08:00

Posted by: Kevin Gollum Lim, Technical Writer

Most people who need something just go to the store to get the item, but a number of people take the time and effort to handcraft their own stuff. They do that because they enjoy tinkering with things until they work just the way they like them. Well, Custom Search has a group of developers who are like that, and they want to create and share their tools.

For such developers, we have good news. We launched a new API that lets other services connect to Custom Search. You can programmatically create, update, and delete search engines without going through the Custom Search control panel. In fact, the API offers most of the functionality that the Custom Search platform provides, and we're working on supporting the rest.

If you provide a service such as hosting websites or blogs, you can partner with Google to create custom search engines for your users. You can use the API to integrate Custom Search into your management console. Your users can then create search engines using your service and will need to use the Custom Search control panel only if they want to be more involved in the customization of their search engines. In our previous blog entry, we talked about how several web hosting providers have already done this. (If you are a web hosting provider who wants to integrate search into the sites you host, please ping us.)

Even if you are not providing a service for a large set of users, you could still create a lot of cool things with the API. Here are a few ideas: If you have a list of websites that change frequently, you can automate the updating of your annotations file; if you have a content management system, you could create search for all your webpages and even create search labels based on your existing categories; if you are a blogging platform, you can enable search for all your blogs.

To learn more about the new API, read the programmer's guide.

Home delivery of Custom Search to webmasters

2009-01-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

Posted by: Radu Cornea, Software Engineer and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Until today, when you wanted to add Google Custom Search to your site, you had to head directly to our Custom Search Engine site. Although creating your own Google-powered search engine only takes a few minutes, we thought it might be easier if we delivered this functionality right to where many of you manage your sites online. Choice is a beautiful thing.

If you own a website hosted on IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb, FatCow, BizLand, EasyCGI and several other web hosting providers, you can now configure Custom Search right in your hoster's management console - these hosters now support both Webmaster Tools and Custom Search. It's like having pizza delivered to your door instead of having to drive over to the pizza parlour!

When you sign up for the service, you get the following benefits, all from the comfort of your hoster's control panel:

a Google account is automatically created for you - you don't have to remember additional passwords or login to use these Google services
you can generate search engines for your websites by simply identifying your domains
shortcuts are provided to manage your Webmaster Tools account and your Custom Search Engines
Sitemaps for URLs on your sites can be automatically submitted to Webmaster Tools for better indexing on Google.com
your Custom Search engines will automatically recognize and use the submitted Sitemaps for enhanced indexing coverage
you can make money by associating your Adsense publisher ID with your search engines and sharing advertising revenue with Google
you can upgrade your search engines to use Site Search for further control over branding, presentation (via XML results) and On-Demand indexing

If your site is hosted by one of the above providers, give it a try - go to your hoster's console and add a search box to your site if you don't already have one. High quality search improves user experience, and also directly increases user engagement and improves conversions on web sites.

Additionally, let us know if there are things about this integrated service offering that we can improve. Our programmer's guide provides more details about the new Custom Search APIs that allow programmatic creation and management of Custom Search engines. If you are a web site hoster interested in incorporating these Google webmaster services into your platform, please contact us.

Searching the Google Timeline

2008-12-11T13:58:00.000-08:00

Posted by: Tyler Morse, Software Engineer and Dylan Casey, Product Manager

When we set out to build a timeline to commemorate Google's 10th birthday, we wanted to add an experimental search feature. We may be a little biased, but because we needed to search a specific subset of the web, and needed customized presentation, we decided to use Google Site Search, which is powered by the Custom Search platform. Using Site Search, the team designed a customized user interface and user experience, tightly embedded within the timeline application, in a few days.

The Google Timeline data is stored and served up as static files of JavaScript objects and arrays. While this was very efficient for the Timeline JavaScript application, we needed to massage the data in order to get it indexed and searchable, as well as tie it back to the timeline objects.

We generated static HTML files for all timeline events. The filenames have identifying data in them that allow us to correlate a search result with the original event; this way, we can translate a user click on a search result to the appropriate timeline event. Since we wanted explicit control of event dates, we also encoded the event date in each HTML file.

We use Site Search's flexible XML interface for retrieving the results. When we get back search results, we parse the XML data, extract specifically the information we need, and render these results.

Since we did not want to take users away from the timeline application, we presented the results inline. As we had limited real estate available, we only displayed 3 results at a time. As shown in the screenshot above, we added pagination to the results section, and the ability to sort the events by event date.

We couldn't treat our search results like typical URLs, as on Google.com. We wanted to show users the event within the actual timeline when they clicked on a search result, instead of navigating them to the indexed static HTML file. Clicking on a result provides an interactive experience, and brings up the specific timeline event.

The end result: a Google search for Google's history, custom fit to meet the specific needs of our timeline, just before we blew out the candles on our cake.

On-Demand Indexing for a fast-moving web

2008-11-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

Posted by: Tom Duerig and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineers

Earlier this year when we launched Google Site Search, and AdSense for Search started using the Custom Search platform, we created a special Custom Search Engine (CSE) index for enhanced indexing. Webmasters could submit Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools, and the Custom Search platform indexed URLs from these Sitemaps into a special CSE index for more comprehensive coverage.

This solved an important problem: the need for enhanced index coverage for site search. The special CSE index, in addition to the Google index, enabled us to search deeper on selected sites, providing higher search quality.

Today, with our launch of On-Demand Indexing, we're addressing the need to provide fast indexing for your important, frequently-changing content. On-Demand indexing allows anyone with a Google Custom Search Engine or Google Site Search to identify and tell us about new pages or recent site changes by submitting a Sitemap to our Webmaster Tools. You can then select this specific Sitemap in the Indexing tab of your CSE control panel and hit the new "Index Now" button. We will immediately schedule the relevant pages for crawling and indexing, and these pages will be included in your search results usually within 24 hours - often much faster.

We realize that new or frequently updated content is often crucial to a website. In order to give you more control over how you use the On-Demand Index resources allocated to you, we will honor the priority and lastmod attributes that you provide in your Sitemap - this means you can identify what URLs should be given preference. Please ensure that your Sitemap metadata is up-to-date.

On-Demand Indexing uses a special index that is designed just for Custom Search. The main Google search indexing process is separate and uses different selection criteria, so submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com. For more information on On-Demand Indexing, as well as the allocation per CSE, please refer to our FAQ.

We are always listening at our Custom Search discussion group, so please continue to tell us what features you'd like to see added to Custom Search.

Knol - now with Custom Search

2008-10-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Cedric Dupont, Product Manager

Knol is a project aimed at helping people share their knowledge. Knols (units of knowledge) are authoritative articles written by people about a specific subject, ranging from tooth pain to solar energy to buttermilk pancakes. With all of these knols to browse, our readers have been begging us for a more powerful search tool. Well, today we have good news - we've added the power of Custom Search to Knol.

Custom Search gives us all of the speed and relevance of Google's search technology, but required none of the hard labor that went into making Google search what it is today. With Custom Search, Knol visitors will have a fast search experience that features all of the bells and whistles Google searchers have come to love (including our advanced spell checker). When you search within Knol, the search results look a little different from Web Search results (see this search for knee surgery, for instance). We were able to maintain that distinct feel for Knol search by taking advantage of the Custom Search XML results format (via Google Site Search) and creating the search result display that we wanted.

We want to hear from you if you have feedback on Knol search. Please leave your comment on our help page.

Synonyms for your Custom Search Engine

2008-10-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Victor Wang and Bartlomiej Niechwiej, Software Engineers

With our launch of Google Site Search, we added a new feature to the Custom Search platform: custom synonyms. Here's how this feature can be used to improve the quality of your Custom Search Engine (CSE).

How can custom synonyms help?
Synonyms help by finding documents with relevant related terms and ranking them higher. Synonyms can help to alleviate the mismatch that often occurs between the queries that users type, and the actual words, phrases and concepts used in the documents being searched. Custom Search, of course, automatically takes advantage of synonyms used in Google Web search. In addition, Custom Search goes one step further: we allow you to explicitly define custom synonyms that are specific to your web site, community or topic of interest.

To illustrate situations where CSE custom synonyms can help, we created 2 CSEs that both search content from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). The first CSE does not have custom synonyms enabled, while the second CSE has a few custom synonyms enabled:

Terminology: The queries people use sometimes don't match up with the words and phrases used in the content being searched. During allergy season, for example, many people look for information on "hayfever", but the results without synonyms aren't that great since the web pages we're searching across don't necessarily use this specific term. However, if the technical phrase "allergic rhinitis" is added as a synonym for "hayfever", the results with the synonym are far better.

Acronyms: Acronyms often stand for different terms in different contexts. This is especially true within organizations, where acronyms are used frequently. In such cases, it may be possible to improve retrieval via the use of synonyms. Thus, "PAMF" refers to "Palo Alto Medical Foundation", and adding this synonym improves search results: searching for "PAMF" without synonyms gives only a few relevant results, while the CSE with the synonym returns more relevant results.

Community: Within specific target user communities, words or phrases have different usage and significance. When a patient is looking for "hearing doctor", adding the synonym "audiologist" to the CSE provides much better results while the results in the CSE without synonyms are not optimal. Conversely, if a doctor is searching for "somnambulism", she finds no results at all in the CSE without synonyms, but much better results via addition of the synonym "sleepwalking" to the CSE. Synonyms can therefore be used to improve the experience of specific classes of users of a web site.

How can I add synonyms to my Custom Search Engine?
The CSE administrator can control the set of synonyms used by uploading a synonym dictionary that is specific to the domain and website. The synonym dictionary can include alternate words or phrases for common search queries. The following steps show how to add the synonyms for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation CSE.

Download the existing CSE context file through "Control panel"->Advanced->"Download context"

Add custom synonyms to your search engine. The synonym dictionary is uploaded as part of the context XML file. Here are the synonyms we added for the above examples:


<customsearchengine>
 <title>...</title>
 <description>...</description>
 <context>
  <backgroundlabels>...</backgroundlabels>

  <synonyms>
   <synonymentry word="hearing doctor">
    <synonym>audiologist</synonym>
   </synonymentry>
   <synonymentry word="hayfever">
    <synonym>allergic rhinitis</synonym>
   </synonymentry>
   <synonymentry word="somnambulism">
    <synonym>sleepwalking</synonym>
   </synonymentry>
   <synonymentry word="pamf">
    <synonym>Palo Alto Medical Foundation</synonym>
   </synonymentry>
  </synonyms>

 </context>
</customsearchengine>

Upload the context file through "Control panel"->Advanced->"Upload context"

A few notes:

CSE synonyms are unidirectional, not bidirectional. Thus, a context file with
```
<synonymentry word="migraine"><synonym>headache</synonym></synonymentry>
```
defines "headache" to be a synonym for "migraine". However, if you also want "migraine" to be considered as a synonym for "headache", you need to add a separate SynonymEntry to the XML, as follows:
```
<synonymentry word="migraine"><synonym>headache</synonym></synonymentry>
<synonymentry word="headache"><synonym>migraine</synonym></synonymentry>
```

In the current version, the synonym dictionary can only be uploaded/downloaded as a part of the context XML file. We hope to make this much easier in the future.

We allow up to 500 individual synonyms for a given CSE.

Each word can have no more than 10 synonyms. If there multiple synonyms, the query will be expanded to include all synonyms uniformly.

If you are using custom synonyms in your CSE, we hope to get feedback from you about what improvements we can make.